About Me

Staten Island, New York, United States
I've worked in the FDNY for the past 29 years. I've written freelance commentary for the past twenty years and have one book published "Looking Up (A Working View)," Quiet Storm Publishers. For those of you with whom my ideas resonate, we probably share a common love of Liberty. If you like anything you read here, feel free to reuse...just please add my appellation. Life's been more than fair to me and this is a part of my humble offering back. If you have any corrections, or additions, please email me (my email address is in my profile) and I’ll both appreciate and consider them all and do my best to get back to you with my thoughts on it. My ideas are always evolving and I’m open to persuasion in all areas. I thank all those who've taken some of their time to read here.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Disparate impact is NOT proof of discrimination..I’ll say that again for those a little slow on the uptake, Disparate Impact is NOT proof of discrimination..Moreover, our laws are clear that "Disparate Impact" cannot be used to prove discrimination on either an individual or class action basis..Any lawyers care to disagree?.Every single standard (from the LSATs, to the MCATs, to HS Regents exams) has a disparate impact, and not merely between blacks and whites, but between all ethnic groups, in fact, there would be some disparate impact no matter how you divided the people taking those tests..As a "proof of discrimination," Disparate Impact is a legal canard. It is the Civil Rights version of the classic “slip & fall” scam..But “Disparate Impact” has been used by women’s groups to dilute the physical standards and by black groups to dumb down the written exams for a whole host of .Municipal Services.

.WHY? Is it not obvious that higher standards render a higher quality workforce?

Of course it's obvious and especially post-9/11 one would think that workforce quality would trump all other concerns. "Diversity" is fine, but it's value-neutral. If one CANNOT prove that more females and more minorities on any given job would improve the overall efficiency (ie. cops shooting better, firefighters running, climbing faster) then that concern MUST take a back-seat to demonstrable quality and that quality is best measured on standardized written and physical exams - the more arduous, the better, meaning, the more arduous and demanding the exam, the better quality workforce rendered.

.For the past twenty years the FDNY written entrance exam, like its NYPD counterpart, has been so dumbed down that a group of mentally handicapped people were once bused in to take an NYPD written entrance exam and most of those mildly retarded people passed the entrance exam!.That's an outrage!.Disparate Impact proves nothing at all. It merely shows that one given group is doing less well than others. That information should be neither surprising, nor actionable..Remember “Test Bias?”.Quietly, it’s been proven NOT to exist!.Those who challenged the SAT exam on “Test Bias” failed to prove their case as the largest disparity in SAT scores were found to be on the mathematical portion of the exam, where concepts like "2, 4, division, multiplication and subtraction" are known to be the same for everyone. Even on the Verbal portion, the proponents of "Test Bias" couldn't come up with examples of overt bias, for instance the claim that "inner city students never having seen a yacht couldn't be expected to know what one is."

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Really? Few working and middle class whites have seen a yacht and fewer rural whites, still and yet most of them had no trouble "knowing what one was." In fact, many blacks and Hispanics did too..Given that “Test Bias” is a canard, then it stands to reason that “Disparate Impact” is also a ruse..The charge that blacks are only 2.9% of the FDNY and Hispanics only 4.5% only seems to indicate that the best candidates from those groups overwhelmingly take other opportunities..Moreover, as Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute states the very same disparities exist on the SAT, LSAT and the MCAT tests!.Moreover, Military pilots and Special Forces have even less “diversity,” as fewer than 1% of the Navy’s pilots are female and less than 3% are minority. There are almost no females in the U.S. Special Forces and again under 3% minorities..It seems more than reasonable to presume that so long as the same exam is given to every candidate the exam is, by definition, “FAIR.”.In fact, if anything, the case can far easier be made that BOTH the written and physical FDNY entrance exams should be made much tougher, NOT any easier..I don’t ask much. In this case all I ask if that if you’re going to charge an exam like the FDNY entrance exam with discrimination, be able to prove how that test was designed to discriminate specifically against YOU..“Disparate Impact” does not do that. A person truly discriminated against must be able to point to a specific action and its malicious intent to get redress.

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Is that the kind of Justice Department America wants?

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One that would be the quality of First Responders behind other, less vital considerations?

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If you disagree, please, by all means do, but please be prepared to prove how giving the same exam to every candidate, no matter how arduous the standards, "discriminates" against a specific ethnic, racial or gender group. I've yet to see any actual proof of that.

6 comments:

This country was built on individualism, not collectivism, the end result of which is always the same: mediocrity. Remove the incentive and the means to excel, and you have the perfect collectivist society; one where everyone is equal but no one is happy.

Perfection may be impossible to achieve on this earth, but we've come pretty close in America. We were fortunate enough to have a group of brilliant, rugged, individualists to launch this thing back in the 18th century. Steady as she goes.

Mick, the worst thing about these kinds of lawsuits is that they're based on the view that blacks and other "minorities" can't compete on an equal level with standardized exams.

That remains (1) UNPROVEN and (2) based on racial bigotry at its core.

High standards don't unfairly "discriminate" against anyone. So long as the same test is given to all candidates, they're all shooting at the same 10' rim - that's about as "fair" as it can possibly get.

Some people won't be happy until anyone can get hired anywhere and the quality of all services gets so bad that people start dying due to mass ineptness.

And then those same people who wanted "fairer" tests won't understand how this could happen. WHY? Because THEY are the ones unable to pass the current tests. Stupidity isn't curable. And ignorance is only if stupidity isn't part of the equation.

Without question Dan O, and a lot of people see any standards at all as "unfair barriers."

In NYC the Sanitation Dept now gives an entrance exam so easy that there are generally over 15,000 "qualified candidates" (as in minimally qualified candidates) and they just use a lottery system to fill in the list - if you pass with the bare minimumn score or a 100% you have the same odds of being in the top 100 picked.

Since such lotteries are non-transparent, there's nothing keeping the city from "tweaking" those numbers to make sure every group is represented.